Panthers forward Scottie Upshall, who has played just 17 games this season with three points, makes his first appearance tonight since Jan. 24 when he realized that he needed sports hernia surgery. No word yet on the scratches.
Flyers/Penguins superstar Jaromir Jagr gave the Panthers props after last night’s hard-fought 2-1 victory.

“You have to give them credit. They know how to win. They’ve won five straight and they shut down our neutral zone and created a lot of turnovers,” Jagr said.

The Panthers believe that tough 2-1 shootout loss to the Penguins fired them up and ignited this five-game winning streak. Here’s Panthers Ed Jovanovski’s take.

“We know they’re a great team, they’re a well coached team. They have a lot of offensive weapons and they’re a big physical team. I think last time in here was tough on our group and I think it really turned part of our season around. I know it’s late, but we’ve played well since that. I think, as a group, we wanted to get those two points in Pittsburgh. We played well enough to win that game and we’ll just carry it on from there. But, yeah, we all have statement games where we know that if it does happen, we’re capable of winning in here.

Five-game winning streak?

“Well, it’s huge. You want to do whatever it takes to create that distance between teams. Eleven out of twelve points in the last six games has been nice for us. Climbing in the standings, putting that little gap between Washington and Winnipeg and we’ll see what happens. It feels good. It becomes contagious, you know, when you win, you find ways to win. Today, our goaltender was great and that gave us a chance to win.”

Q: They had the early power plays going, but you guys shut them down and then right after you killed a power play, you scored that first goal. In terms of the momentum and getting it in early, how big was that?

“It all seems to work out that way. If you get the kills, guys feed off of them and you find ways to reward the group that killed off all of the penalties. [Weiss] made a great play just inside the blue line there and froze Bryz and got a great shot. So it was nice, after all of that hard work, to grab the lead on them.”

Comments (3 Comments)

This team has grown in such a big way since the start of the season. If they keep this up (plus home ice advantage in the first round at the very least), they are quite capable of doing some serious damage in the post-season.

HARVEY FIALKOV, a tennis-playing sportswriter who grew up in Long Island following the dynastic Islanders, is the new Panthers beat writer for the Sun Sentinel and looking forward to writing about the best professional sports team in Broward County.